Under the 1947
UKUSA Agreement, each of the signatory nations granted each of
the other nations permission to monitor themselves. We monitor
them and they monitor us. Actually, we could not stop them from
monitoring us if we wanted to. But that is not the end of it.

Each of the
five nations involved in ECHELON have either laws or a Constitutional
Amendment prohibiting unreasonable searches and seizures. In the
USA, it is the 4th Amendment that guarantees us protection
"against unreasonable searches and seizures" and further
requires that "no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause."
The Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly that your electronic communications,
whether voice, fax or email are protected under the 4th Amendment.
What this means is that if any government agency wants to monitor your
electronic communications, they must first show "probable cause"
to a judge that you are breaking a specific law.

To get around
our 4th Amendment protections, US law enforcement officials have
taken to using surrogates. The FDIC recently tried to enact
a rule requiring banks to profile all of their customers and report
those who deviate from an accepted profile (see "Bank
Spying"). If government officers went into
the bank and did that themselves, it would most certainly be ruled illegal
search and seizure. But, by making the bank their surrogate, they
thought that they could skirt the 4th Amendment.

The same type
of thing is occurring with ECHELON, but at an enormously greater
level. It is not illegal for Communications Intelligence (COMINT)
authorities in Great Britain, for example, to indiscriminately and randomly
monitor US civilian communications, just as it is not illegal for the
NSA to indiscriminately and randomly monitor British civilian
communications. So, under UKUSA, COMINT agents in each
of the UKUSA partner nations monitor each other's domestic communications
and pass suspect communications on to the authorities in the other country.
Each nation becomes a surrogate spy for the other. Although
there are technically no laws broken in either country, each
country's government has subverted its own laws to achieve the goal
of monitoring its own citizens.

US authorities
can take your private conversation, recorded legally by a British
COMINT agency, to the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC),
which considers surveillance and physical search orders from the Department
of Justice and US intelligence agencies, and truthfully tell the court
that the evidence was stumbled upon by a friendly foreign government
in the process of another investigation. In any other court, you
would expect that the judge would want to know more about how the evidence
was obtained. But the FISC judge, who is effectively a part of
the US intelligence community, does not want to know more. Since
the FISC was created over 20 years ago, as a part of the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978, the court has heard well over
10,000 applications for covert surveillance and physical searches. To
date, not a single application has been denied. I challenge
anyone to show me an example of any other court in the USA that
has such a record for complacency in the issuing of warrants.
It is an absolute certainty that the US agency involved will get a court
order to place a legal tap on all of your electronic communications.

Our government,
through the NSA and ECHELON, with the cooperation of the
FISC has quite effectively subverted
the 4th Amendment.